Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Surgery, gynaecology, vaccination, science and medical journalism, first aid and lifesaving, eighteenth-century medicine, nineteenth-century medicine, humanities in medical education.

About Me: I am a historian of medicine and healthcare, primarily working on Britain from 1750 onwards. My doctoral research was on the history of surgery and my book, Belly-Rippers, Surgical Innovation and the Ovariotomy Controversy, explores a controversial operation developed in the nineteenth century – the removal of the ovaries. Following this project I went on to do further research on surgical risk and innovation and have written about the development of keyhole surgery in the 1980s.

More recently I’ve been working on a history of medical journalism. I’m interested in how medical information circulates between professional and public spheres, particularly in regard to more contested practices, such as vaccination. My second book project will explore the global development of medical journalism as a specialist form of writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how this has shaped the meaning of medicine.

I also write about the history of first aid and how it became a cultural phenomenon in Victorian Britain.

Recent Publications

‘“A Borderland in Ethics”: Medical Journals, the Public and the Medical Profession in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ In Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: How they Constructed Communities. Editors: Dawson G, Lightman B, Shuttleworth S and Topham, J. University of Chicago Press (forthcoming March 2020).
‘The Medical Press, the Profession and the Public.’ In the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2. Editor: Finkelstein D. Edinburgh University Press (2020).
‘Opening the Abdomen: The Expansion of Surgery’ In the Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery. Editor: Schlich T. Palgrave Macmillan (2017).
‘Defining Difference: Competing forms of Ovarian Surgery in the Nineteenth Century’ In Technological Change in Modern Surgery: Historical Perspectives on Innovation. Editors: Schlich T, Crenner C. The University of Rochester Press (2017). Open Access.
‘The Debris of Life: Diseased Ovaries in Eighteenth-Century Medicine’ In The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century. Editors: Stephanson R, Wagner D. University of Toronto Press (2015).

(Co-authored with Sarah Chaney) ‘Mind-Boggling Medical History: Creating a medical history game for new audiences’ Science Museum Journal 11 (2019). Open Access.
(Co-authored with Jennifer Wallis) ‘Reading Medicine and Health in Periodicals’ (introduction to a special issue on medical and health periodicals edited by Frampton and Wallis) Media History 25: 1 (2018).
(Co-authored with Roger Kneebone). ‘John Wickham’s New Surgery: ‘Minimally Invasive Therapy’, Innovation, and Approaches to Medical Practice in Twentieth-century Britain’ Social History of Medicine 30: 3 (2017). Open Access.
‘Honour and subsistence: Invention, Credit and Surgery in the Nineteenth Century’ British Journal for the History of Science 49:4 (2016). Open Access.